ETD Competency

Level 1

Individuals who complete this level will know all the basic skills and guidelines to help with any ETD at the desk. Those who complete this level will also have the knowledge needed to research problems that they encounter as they help graduate students.

  • Receive your Word level 2 badge before applying for this badge.

Demonstrate skill with:

  • Use styles to format Headings 1 – 3 (ALL Headings should be done in APA styles)
  • Use Style separators for Heading 3
    • For Example, Heading 3’s should look likes this (see below) but should not have the entire paragraph the Heading 3 applies as part of the heading.
      • “Mean Length of Utterance. The use of MLU as a measure syntactic complexity in child language is a long-standing practice. Brown (1973) popularized the use of MLU based on morpheme count as a simple index of grammatical development….”
  • Follow the ETD guidelines as they appear in the pdf labeled GradStudies_Checklist.pdf that can be found on the byutraining@gmail.com Drive, under Competency Badge example files.
    • Keep in mind these formatting changes from the Checklist (as of Aug 2017)
      • Only the year after the copyright symbol is needed on the title page
    • If the checklist doesn’t specify a specific format, use APA guidelines.
  • Generate table of contents
  • Generate a list of tables and figures using your own styles or captions.
  • Insert section breaks to achieve correct page numbers.
  • Convert the word to PDF, make sure fonts are embedded and the initial view properties setting is set on “Bookmarks Panel and Page.”

You should also be able to demonstrate:

  • The two best ways to export to PDF
    • XPS/PDF export
    • Acrobat Tab
  • The two ways to embed fonts in Acrobat
    • Embed Missing fonts
    • Fix Font problems
  • Where to look and see if font problems exist in the pdf

Questions you should be able to answer:

  • What amount of editing can be done directly to the PDF before you have to go back to word?
  • How to delete a page, or turn a page landscape, in Acrobat.

Level 2

Completing this level requires time and initiative. There aren’t any additional skills necessary, only practice. After you have worked here for at least 2 semesters and helped a number of different people with their ETD’s, let the ETD sage know that you wish to earn the level 2 ETD badge. Oftentimes they will reward you the badge upon asking additional questions about your experience helping people with ETD’s.

Good luck!  The fate of masters and doctorate student graduations depends on you!